I'm a busy guy. It's been very, very hard for me to find the time to learn enough about the innards of LinuxMCE to tackle the problem of the non-working HDMI sound on my Jetway Mini-top. However, a week ago after several months of wimpy twiddling and random bashing of the keyboard, I finally figured out how to get HDMI sound working in the crappy 10.04 release (note: I do not like Ubuntu, but don't take that to mean I don't like LinuxMCE. I will be randomly raging against Upoontu, so don't cry).

I have no idea if what I'm about to spell out will work on the current stable LinuxMCE release. I gave up on it while ago because of stupidness (e.g. my second NIC not working without manually building a new driver). I also pieced together most of what needed to be done from several different sources. However, figuring out the order and the repeated testing, plus some key pieces to the final solution were all my doing. If I wasn't already very well experienced with Linux systems, I would have been completely lost. Overall it was not fun, but man was I happy when it all came together.

So...

PRO TIP: make sure the Mini-top's (or whatever it is you're using for your MD) HDMI port is actually plugged into something and that something is powered ON!

NOTE: All these steps were performed on the MD after I logged into it via SSH. I did not do a "chroot" to the MD's directory on the core (i.e. /usr/pluto/diskless/XX).

This alias bullshit I pulled from memory....from way, way back in the early days of Fedora when I had to battle with alsa to get sound working. I'm not sure it's actually needed here, but I put the crap in anyway. The second line came from the xbmc forums and the xbmc wiki - so awesome.

apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-$(uname -r)This was the biggest piece of the puzzle. Without this package, the nvidia soundcard would not be detected by alsa. I have no idea how the shit I figured this crap out. I think I read about it somewhere on the net. I know for sure it wasn't at all in reference to LinuxMCE, the ION2 or HDMI sound. FUCK!

The only problem is I'm sure a future update will likely blow some of my changes away. I hope the devs can incorporate what I've done into the setup scripts, thereby truly automating this particular MD's LinuxMCE setup.

Oh, one final note: I'll make sure the wiki article has a better flow for the steps (a couple are out of logical order, though the way I wrote the above how-to won't prevent HDMI sound from being correctly setup).

Could you amend your script changes in a way, that it detects the Jetway hardware and does the changes only for that hardware? A patch like that would be helpful, and could be incorporated into svn, so other people directly have a successful experience, without needing to modify scripts themselves.

Could you amend your script changes in a way, that it detects the Jetway hardware and does the changes only for that hardware? A patch like that would be helpful, and could be incorporated into svn, so other people directly have a successful experience, without needing to modify scripts themselves.

The only problem is I don't know what to modify. Where does the detection happen?

It occurs now after looking over this that an alsa upgrade AND and nvidia upgrade is occurring.

In 1004 this will not be automated. Alsa is pegged there for reasons which apply to other areas of the system as I understand it. I cannot break parts of the system automatically for this.

However, I would be interested in working to make this happen in 1004 with the native nvidia-glx-260 and alsa .23. It appears that the video driver upgrade doesn't really make any difference. While working with someone in IRC they were able to get their audio going with the alsa upgrade on nvidia-glx-195, having forgotten to add the ppa before forcing the nvidia-current install.

So... I am given to believe it is just an alsa thing, and as alsa upgrade is required for the nvidia 295 driver from swat (the .40 edition has regression issues btw), I am not sure if anyone has tried to get alsa .23 going, as people presume it is the graphics driver which is failing to even run avwizard, or play movies in MD... when in truth it is the same busted alsa config causing this behavior.

The only possible reason to upgrade to the new driver is for the 5 chipsets which have the new VDPAU rev D.

Anyway... until I get my hands on the hardware, or an ssh hole to it, I can only guess at what might work. If you don't mind investing the time, I would be curious if you could similarly make this HW work with our native drivers.

Unfortunately it does require an update from nvidia 265 (so the ion2 architecture may be recognized) AND an update to alsa (to recognize and understand how to work with the updated nvidia hardware), in terms what revision they need to be at or what the cutoff is I don't know and that's pretty much where my investigation died off a couple of months back.

Considering the fundamental nature of these updates, when will 12.04 go into alpha testing? It may be worthy to test the updates we need to recognize this hardware there.

I have totally hosed Xconfigure.sh however, and could really use some help when you have some time. I know you are busy. I have hacked it up to work, but I am not convinced that is enough. Drop into IRC when you have time and I will explain/show you what I have done.